Materials that meet the definition of "infectious waste," as defined by the Environmental Protection Agency or the Center for Disease Control (Atlanta, Ga.), must be disposed of in a specified manner that renders it non-infectious. Steam sterilization, incineration, and other acceptable means must be employed. If the treatment process is off-site, i.e., at a location other than the site where the infectious waste was generated, then the waste must be packaged, transported, stored and otherwise handled in accordance with a multitude of strict regulations. Compliance with such regulations requires the increased expenditure of labor and other resources and accordingly is very costly vis a vis the cost of disposing of non-infectious wastes.
Most medical wastes easily qualify as infectious waste and thus require special handling. Hospitals generally place needles, syringes and other sharp objects in rigid, hard plastic cylindrical containers known as sharps containers. All other contaminated materials are placed in red plastic bags. Both the sharps container and the red bags require special handling and disposal. However, some producers of infectious waste cavalierly ignore applicable laws and dump such waste illegally, thereby despoiling the environment and threatening public health. The cleanup costs are paid by third parties unless the responsible parties are apprehended and compelled to pay by legal measures.
The quantity of medical waste produced each year is substantial; those hospitals and other facilities that generate large amounts of such waste are heavily burdened by the cost of legally disposing of the same and suffer unfair competition from those facilities that circumvent the laws.
Accordingly, there is a clear need for new solutions to the medical waste disposal problem. The old solution of disposing of such wastes at conventional, approved disposal sites having facilities for treating the waste is unacceptable due to its high cost, but the prior art neither teaches nor suggests how the unsatisfactory state of the art could be advanced.